“What’s the secret?”
“Don’t fall in love.”
“I’ve only done that once.”
“And, from what you said, it ruined your life.”
“Perhaps. But . . .”
“Let me guess: when it was right, it was . . . I dunno . . . Transcendental? Incomparable? Peerless? Am I getting warm?”
“I just loved him. That’s all.”
“And now?”
“Now I wish he’d leave me alone.”
“What you mean is: you wish you could stop thinking about him.”
“Yes. That is what I mean. I still hate him. I still love him.”
“Do you want to forgive him?”
“Yes, I do. But I can’t.”
“There’s your answer, Sara. From where I sit, it’s the right answer. Most women would never have had anything to do with him after the way he initially disappeared on you. To then betray you and your brother . . .”
“You’re right, you’re right.”
“Your response to his sister’s letter was the proper one. It’s finished, over, kaput. Don’t look back. He’s a bad piece of work.”
I nodded.
“Anyway, as you already know, this town is crawling with interesting guys. Not to mention a lot of uninteresting guys who are still baisable, if you catch my drift. Go out, have some more adventures. Believe me, in a couple of months, you’ll have gotten over him.”
I wanted to believe that. And to accelerate this distancing process, I continued my series of cavalier flings. No, I didn’t turn into a femme fatale, with three guys on the go at once. I was an old-fashioned serial monogamist. I met someone. I took up with them for a little while. I let the thing run its course. When it started getting serious, or tiresome, or simply routine, I’d jump ship. I became an expert at disentangling myself from a relationship with the minimum of fuss. Men were useful for companionship, for occasional acts of tenderness, and for the ephemeral pleasures of sex. Anytime I found someone getting too dependent on me, I’d end it quickly. Anytime a guy started trying to change me—to wonder out loud what on earth I was doing living in a small atelier, and why I favored Colette-style pantsuits over more “feminine” apparel—they’d be politely shown the door. In the four years I resided in Paris, I had three marriage proposals—all of which I turned down. None of the men in question was wildly inappropriate. On the contrary, the first was a successful merchant banker; the second, a lecturer in literature at the Sorbonne; and the third, a would-be novelist, living on Daddy’s trust fund. All of them were, in their own way, thoroughly charming and intelligent and emotionally stable. But each of them was on the lookout for a wife. That was a role I wasn’t interested in ever playing again.
The years in Paris evaporated far too quickly. On December 31, 1954, I stood on a balcony overlooking the avenue Georges V in the company of Isabel van Arnsdale, and assorted other Herald Tribune reprobates. As car horns sounded—and a fireworks display illuminated the winter sky—I hoisted my glass toward Isabel and said, “Here’s to my last year in Paris.”
“Stop talking crap,” she said.
“It’s not crap: it’s the truth. By this time next year, I want to be on my way back to the States.”
“But you’ve got a great life here.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“Then why the hell throw it all away?”
“Because I’m not a professional expatriate. Because I miss baseball, and bagels, and Barney Greengrass the Sturgeon King, and Gitlitz’s Delicatessen, and showers that work, and a grocery store that delivers, and speaking my own language, and . . .”
“Him?”
“No goddamn way.”
“You promise?”
“When have you last heard me speak about him?”
“Can’t remember.”
“There you go.”
“Then when are you going to do something stupid, like fall in love again?”
“Hang on—you told me that the only way to get through life was by never falling in love.”
“Jesus Christ, you really don’t think I’d expect anyone to follow that advice?”
But the thing was: I had followed her counsel. Not intentionally. Rather, because, after Jack, no one I met ever triggered that wonderfully strange, deranged, dangerous surge of . . . what do you call it? Desire? Delirium? Passion? Completeness? Stupidity? Self-delusion?
Now I knew something else: I couldn’t be with him, and I couldn’t get over him. Time may have numbed the ache—but like any anesthetic, it didn’t heal the wound. I kept waiting for the day when I would wake up and Jack would have finally fled my thoughts. That morning had yet to arrive. An ongoing thought had started to unsettle me: say I never came to terms with this loss? Say it was always there? Say it defined me?
When I articulated this fear to Isabel, she laughed. “Honey, loss is an essential component of life. In many ways, c’est notre destin. And yes, there are certain things you never really get over. But what’s wrong with that?”
“It’s so damn painful . . . that’s what’s wrong with it.”
“But living is painful . . . n’est-ce pas?”
“Cut the existential crap, Isabel.”
“I promise you this—the moment you begin to accept that you’re not going to get over it . . . you might just get over it.”
I kept that thought in mind during the next twelve months—when I drifted into a brief fling with a Danish jazz bassist, and wrote my weekly column, and spent long afternoons at the Cinémathèque Française, and (if the weather was clement) read for an hour each morning on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens, and celebrated my thirty-third birthday by giving notice at the Herald Tribune, and writing Joel Eberts that the sublet of my apartment should end by December 31, 1955. Because I was coming home.
And on January 10, 1956, I found myself back at Pier 76 on West 48th Street, stepping off the SS Corinthia. Joel Eberts was there to meet me.
“You haven’t aged one damn bit, counselor,” I said after giving him a hug. “What’s your secret?”
“Constant litigation. But, hey, you look wonderful too.”
“But older.”
“I’d say, ‘exceedingly elegant.’ ”
“That’s a synonym for ‘older.’ ”
We took a taxi uptown to my apartment. As per my instructions, he’d arranged with the janitor to have it repainted when the tenants moved out before Christmas. It still reeked of turpentine and fresh emulsion—but the whitewash of the walls was a cheering antidote to the ashen January morning.
“Only a crazy person decides to return to New York in the thick of winter,” Joel said.
“I like murk.”
“You must have been a Russian in a former life.”
“Or maybe I’m just someone who has always responded well to gloom.”
“What a lot of dreck you talk. You’re a survivor, kiddo. And a canny one at that. If you don’t believe me, check out the pile of bank and investment statements I’ve left in a folder on your kitchen table. You hardly touched a cent of your capital while you were in France. And the rent from the sublet built up rather nicely. Also: your stockbroker is one sharp operator. He’s managed to add about thirty percent value to both the divorce settlement fund and Eric’s insurance payout. So if you don’t want to work for the next decade . . .”
“Work is something I can’t do without,” I said.
“I concur. But know this—financially speaking, you’re damn comfortable.”
“What’s in here?” I asked, kicking a cardboard box that was by the couch.
“It’s all of the accumulated mail I didn’t forward to you over the years. I had it sent up yesterday.”
“But you forwarded me just about everything, except . . .”
“That’s right. His letters.”
“I told you to throw them out.”
“I decided that there was no harm keeping them until your return . . . just in case you decided you di
d want to read them, after all.”
“I don’t want to read them.”
“Well, your building gets its garbage collected once a day, so you can throw them out whenever you like.”
“Have you ever heard from Jack or his sister again?”
“Nope. Have you?”
I’d never told Joel about my reply to Meg’s letter. I wasn’t going to now.
“Never,” I said.
“He must have taken the hint. Anyway, it’s all history now. Just like Joe McCarthy. I tell you, I’m no conventional patriot—but on that day in fifty-four when the Senate censured the bastard, I thought: unlike a lot of other places, this country has the reassuring habit of finally admitting that it got something wrong.”
“It’s just too bad they didn’t censure him three years earlier.”
“I know. Your brother was a great man.”
“No—he was simply a good man. Too good. Had he been less good, he’d still be alive. That’s the hardest thing about coming back to Manhattan—knowing that every time I walk by the Ansonia or the Hampshire House . . .”
“I’m sure that, even after four years, it still hurts like hell.”
“Losing your brother never gets easier.”
“And losing Jack?”
I shrugged. “Ancient history.”
He studied my face carefully. I wondered if he saw I was lying.
“Well, that’s something, I guess,” he said.
I changed the subject. Quickly.
“How about letting me buy us lunch at Gitlitz’s?” I said. “I haven’t had a pastrami on rye and a celery soda in five years.”
“That’s because the French know nothing about food.”
I hoisted the box of Jack’s letters. We left the apartment. Once we were outside, I tossed the box into the back of a garbage truck that was emptying cans on West 77th Street. Joel’s eyes showed disapproval, but he said nothing. As the jaws of the truck closed around the box, I wondered: why did you do that? But I covered my remorse by linking my arm through Joel’s, and saying, “Let’s eat.”
Gitlitz’s hadn’t changed in the years I had been away. Nor had most of the Upper West Side. I slotted back into Manhattan life with thankful ease. The bumpy readjustment I had been dreading never materialized. I looked up old friends. I went to Broadway shows and Friday matinées at the New York Philharmonic and the occasional evening at the Metropolitan Opera. I became a habitué once again of the Met and the Frick and the 42nd Street branch of the Public Library, and my two local fleapit movie houses: the Beacon and the Loew’s 84th Street. And every other week, I punched out a “Letter from New York”—which was then dispatched, courtesy of Western Union, to the offices of the Paris Herald Tribune. This bimonthly column was Mort Goodman’s farewell present to me.
“If I can’t get you to stay and write for me in Paris, then I better get you writing for me from New York.”
So now I was a foreign correspondent. Only the country I was covering was my own.
In the four years I was loitering with intent on the rue Cassette (I wrote in a column, datemarked March 20, 1956), something curious happened to Americans: after all the years of economic depression and wartime rationing, they woke up one morning to discover that they now lived in an affluent society. And for the first time since the Roaring Twenties, they’re engaged on a massive spending spree. Only unlike the hedonistic twenties, this oh-so-sensible Eisenhower era is centered around the home—a happy, reasonably affluent God-fearing place, where there are two cars in every garage, a brand new Amana refrigerator in the kitchen, a Philco TV in the living room, a subscription to the Reader’s Digest, and where grace is said before every TV dinner. What? You expatriates haven’t heard of a TV dinner? Well, just when you thought American cuisine couldn’t get more bland . . .
That column (written in one of my flippant H. L. Menckenesque moods) caused my phone to ring off the hook for a few days—as it was picked up by the Paris correspondent of the very conservative San Francisco Chronicle, who used large quotes from it in a piece he wrote about the sort of anti-American rubbish that was being printed in an allegedly respectable paper like the Paris Herald Tribune. Before I knew it, I was back in Walter Winchell’s column:
News Flash: Sara Smythe, one-time yuckster for Saturday Night/Sunday Morning and recent professional American-in-Paris, is back in Gotham City . . . but not too happily. According to our spies, she’s churning out a column featuring a lot of cheap cracks about Our Way of Life for all those bitter expats who choose to live away from these great shores. Memo to Miss Smythe: if you don’t like it here, why not try Moscow?
Four years earlier, Winchell’s smear would have killed all potential employment prospects in New York. How times had changed—for now, I received a series of calls from editors whom I used to know around town during the late forties and early fifties, asking if I’d like to have lunch and talk things over.
“But, according to Winchell,” I told Imogen Woods, my former editor at Saturday/Sunday (now the number two at Harper’s), “I’m still the Emma Goldman of West Seventy-seventh Street.”
“Honey,” Imogen said, digging into her Biltmore Hotel Cobb salad, and simultaneously signaling to the waiter for more drinks, “Walter Winchell is yesterday’s chopped liver. In fact, you should be pleased Winchell took another swing at you. Because it’s how I found out you were back in New York.”
“I was surprised to get your call,” I said carefully.
“I was really glad you agreed to meet me. Because . . . and I’m being totally honest here . . . I was ashamed of myself when Saturday/Sunday let you go. I should have stuck up for you. I should have insisted that someone else give you the news. But I was scared. Terrified of losing my lousy little job. And I hated myself for being such a coward. But I still went along with them. And that will always weigh on my conscience.”
“Don’t let it.”
“It will. And when I read about your brother’s death . . .”
I cut her off before she could say anything more.
“We’re here now,” I said. “And we’re talking. That’s what counts.”
By the end of that lunch, I was the new Harper’s film critic. The phone continued to ring at home. The book editor of the New York Times offered me reviewing work. So too did his counterpart at the New Republic. And a commissioning editor at Cosmopolitan arranged a lunch meeting, telling me she’d love to revive the “Real Life” column—“only tailored to today’s sophisticated fifties woman.”
I accepted the reviewing work. I turned down the Cosmopolitan offer, on the grounds that my erstwhile column was erstwhile. But when the editor asked if I’d like to do a lucrative six-month stint as the magazine’s agony aunt—I accepted on the spot. Because I was about the last person in the world who should be giving out sensible advice.
The Cosmopolitan editor—Alison Finney—took me to lunch at the Stork Club. While we were eating, Winchell came in. The Stork Club had always been his haunt, his outer office—and though everyone in New York now considered Winchell’s power to be on the wane (as Imogen Woods had told me), he still commanded the most highly visible of all corner tables, furnished with its very own telephone. Alison nudged me and said, “There’s your greatest fan.” I shrugged. We finished our lunch. Alison excused herself and disappeared off to the Ladies’. Without thinking about what I was doing, I suddenly stood up and walked toward Winchell’s table. He was correcting some copy, so he didn’t see me approach.
“Mr. Winchell?” I said pleasantly.
He looked up and quickly scrutinized my face. When it was clear I wasn’t worth his attention, he picked up his pencil and glanced back down at his copy.
“Do I know you, young lady?” he said, a hint of gruffness in his voice.
“Actually you do,” I said. “But you know my brother even better.”
“Oh yeah? What’s his name?”
“Eric Smythe.”
I could tell that the name didn�
�t register, as he pursed his lips for a second, then continued making a correction.
“And how’s Eric?” he asked.
“He’s dead, Mr. Winchell.”
His pencil stopped for a moment, but his eyes remained fixed on his copy.
“Sorry to hear that,” he said, sounding dismissive. “My condolences.”
“You don’t know who I’m talking about, do you?”
He said nothing. He continued to ignore me.
“‘He may be Marty Manning’s best scribe . . . but he used to be a Red.’ You wrote that about my brother, Mr. Winchell. He lost his job after that, and ended up drinking himself to death. And you don’t even remember his name.”
Winchell now glanced up—in the direction of the maître d’.
“Sam,” he shouted, pointing toward me. I continued speaking—the tone of my voice remaining conversational, strangely calm.
“And I bet you don’t even remember me, do you? Even though you wrote about me just a week ago. I’m the Sara Smythe who, ‘according to our spies, is churning out a column featuring a lot of cheap cracks about Our Way of Life for all those bitter expats who choose to live away from these great shores. Memo to Miss Smythe: if you don’t like it here, why not try Moscow?’ Amazing how I can quote you chapter and verse, Mr. Winchell.”
I felt a hand touch my arm. It was Sam, the maître d’.
“Miss, would you mind going back to your table, please?” he asked.
“I was just leaving,” I said, then turned back to Winchell. “I just wanted to thank you for that recent mention, Mr. Winchell. You wouldn’t believe how many work offers I’ve had since you wrote about me. It just shows how much clout you still wield these days.”
Then I turned and headed back to my table. I said nothing to Alison about what had just happened when she returned from the Ladies.’ I just suggested we order a final round of drinks. Alison agreed, and motioned to the waiter to freshen up our gimlets. Then she said, “I bet you Winchell will now write something about you drinking too much at lunchtime.”
“That man can write whatever the hell he wants,” I said. “He can’t hurt me anymore.”
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